San Francisco is turning a corner, and Seattle should take note.
San Francisco has seen a remarkable improvement in its quality of life, and by that, I mean less crime, less street trash and disorder, fewer tents and RVs, downtown storefronts leasing up, and a general feeling among many residents and businesses that they have turned the corner toward better times.
They still have a long way to go, but the turnaround evidence is visible. Mayor Daniel Lurie has said his city is at a “fragile moment” and hopes San Franciscans don’t blow it. So, what led to the turnaround?
Perhaps the most significant factor was Lurie’s election in November 2024, when he defeated incumbent London Breed. Lurie has positioned himself as a political moderate, and his approach has been marked by blunt talk, decisive action, and a willingness to challenge nearly all of the city’s diverse political interest groups and activists. He’s accelerated police hiring, warned that public drug dealers and users will be arrested, expanded emergency shelter capacity, and reduced the prevalence of tents and RVs. Reported major crime fell 24.5 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, and it’s down another 18.3 percent so far this year through August 23.
Earlier this year, at the urging of San Francisco Superior Court judges, Lurie did something politicians rarely, if ever, do. He cut funding for a nonprofit group that operates diversion programs. The judges argued that the program was ineffective and urged the city to transfer the work to probation officers. The transfer is scheduled to take effect in July 2027.
As Lurie nears the end of his 18th month in office, his favorability rating stands at a remarkable 74 percent. A November 2025 survey by the Partnership for San Francisco found that 69% of voters believe the city is headed in the right direction.
Could San Francisco’s progress be duplicated here? Before answering that, it helps to see just how different our starting point is.
We’re a different city, with many of the same challenges. We struggle with open-air drug markets – think 12th and Jackson and some of our downtown streets – an increase in tents and RVs, along with the associated trash and disorder, and violent human trafficking on Aurora Avenue North. And, as you will see, our crime problem is much bigger.
Perceptions matter. Unlike San Francisco, only 38 percent of Seattle voters rate our mayor favorably, according to an early August poll sponsored by Challenge Seattle and the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, 52% say the city is headed in the wrong direction.
Seattle is geographically larger than San Francisco. We have 84 square miles of land; they have 47. (I’m excluding bodies of water within both cities.) We have 41,300 fewer people, which translates to 9,343 people per square mile compared with their 17,576. San Francisco is a very dense city.
We have significantly more reported crime than San Francisco. Way more.
I’m focused here on the reported major crime rate for the eight crimes routinely reported by police to the FBI and analyzed by criminologists – aggravated assault, homicide, rape, robbery, arson, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. What’s not included are all the other felony and misdemeanor crimes, including all drug-related crimes.
In 2025, Seattle’s major crime rate was 52.89 per 1,000 people, while San Francisco’s was only 34.66. Even with fewer people, Seattle’s major crime rate was 52.6% higher last year than San Francisco’s. When these numbers are broken down into violent crimes against persons and property crimes, the differences are profound. Seattle’s violent crime rate was 6.47 per 1,000 people in 2025, compared to San Francisco’s 4.84. Our property crime rate is 46.42 per 1,000 people, compared to 29.82. (Crime statistics are a snapshot in time. Many factors influence these rates, with one of the most important being the public’s trust and confidence in the police. More trust, more reporting. Less trust, less reporting. Nationally, the annual crime victimization study shows that only about 40% to 60% of crimes are actually reported to the police.)
We have fewer police officers. At the end of 2025, we had 927 deployable officers, or 1.2 per 1,000 people. San Francisco had 1.82 officers per thousand. Viewed through another lens, we have 11 officers per square mile; San Francisco has 32.
With the above context, there’s another issue we are just beginning to address in Seattle. What is the most effective way to deal with the drug addiction and mental health challenges on our streets? Is it “housing first” and “harm reduction,” or is there a better way? Lurie’s approach in San Francisco is leaning toward another approach, although he contends he’s not abandoning compassionate alternatives to arrest and incarceration.
The Atlantic has an article in the September issue that addresses this directly: “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs” by Michael Powell. Seattle is featured. You can also listen to Powell’s perspective on this Blue City Blues podcast.
I’ve always advocated for more on-demand addiction and mental health treatment services. Yes, it would be expensive, but what is the cost of our current approach, in which people openly smoke or inject drugs, overdose, or frighten others by screaming and running around naked? The harm reduction approach we follow now waits until someone seeks help, believing that effective help is only possible when it is voluntary, not compelled. The result is what we see on our streets and sidewalks every day. As Powell argues in his Atlantic article, this approach has created a “zombie apocalypse.” Maybe it’s time to adjust to a more diversified approach, including being more assertive about treatment options.
I served on the board of Plymouth Housing from 2018 to 2021. I saw firsthand their work housing people and providing supportive services, and their willingness to offer some drug-free housing to those who wanted it. Maybe it’s time for the city government to fund more drug-free housing options instead of an almost exclusive focus on “low-barrier-to-entry housing first,” which allows continued drug use, often to the detriment of those who want to escape those temptations.
Let’s keep an eye on San Francisco. One thing is for sure: our West Coast neighbor 808 miles south of us is trying new approaches. They’ve broken out of the ideologically driven mindset that there’s only one way forward – the harm reduction theory of housing first. Maybe they will find that a range of approaches is better, including stronger nudges to treatment and arresting offenders who are causing the most harm.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Housing First and Harm Reduction are very different strategies.
I think you make the salient point – breakaway from the ideologies and utilize methods that work. It’s that old definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Seattle is a beautiful city and the public spaces should not be surrendered to criminal anarchy. We owe it to our ancestors to leave this place in good condition to our grandchildren.
Yes- “harm reduction” and “housing first” only encourage continued drug use and all the bad that comes with it. The two strategies are different but complimentary. Let’s begin by closing “open air drug markets” and the Atlantic article describes perfectly what is happening in our City.
These are very different things. Harm reduction (designed to save the lives of intravenous drug users) made sense in the bad ol’ days of HIV-AIDS; it makes less sense (to me) today. Housing First (which is NOT “housing only”) makes perfect sense now and always. Stabilize people’s lives, and make it easier for them to think about the future. Drug treatment works alongside Housing First.
We did have a moderate mayor before he was ousted by our current mayor, albeit he was not as bold in his initiatives as this San Francisco mayor is.
Many towns and cities in the U.S. need to take a look at these changes that San Fransisco is making. An increase in common sense and tough-love approaches are sorely needed.
Tim Burgess writes that Seattle should study San Francisco’s turnaround: more cops, less ineffective diversion, less exclusive Housing First. Exactly what we have needed to do for over a decade when he has power.
Tim doesn’t mention Compassion Seattle his own charter amendment to lock 12% of Seattle’s budget into homeless response and force 2,000 units.
They spent hundreds of thousands gathering signatures. Roughly half weren’t Seattle voters. ACLU and Transit Riders Union (now-Mayor Katie Wilson) sued it off the ballot. It died. Nobody picked it back up. Probably for good reason.
The fatal error was upstream: treating addiction, fentanyl, and no-accountability diversion as a housing shortage you can solve with a budget percentage. Wrong problem, expensive process, zero ballot.
It’s time to defund Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion getting now $27M and give it to parole officers, stand up 3 strikes for service resistant homeless folks who have been swept multiple times (san jose passed a responsibility to shelter law), defund drug paraphernalia used to smoke illegal substances with our tax dollars, 3 strikes for low level crimes – take a felony or 6 months mandated treatment (prob 36 also S.F.).The specifics are there to follow.
@Andrea Suarez: Why don’t you run for elected office on that platform? Surely you’d muster a massive groundswell of support. Oh, wait.
Tim, what makes you so sure that people who benefit from Housing First don’t reduce their drug use, both public and private? Intuitively, it makes sense that someone who gains stability will be less inclined to use. And I’d wager that Plymouth has solid evidence for it.
One can both be against the lax enforcement that’s bred the Zombie Apocalypse at 12th & Jackson and 3rd & Pine AND think that Housing First is a solid, humane approach.
Thank you, MT. You are absolutely correct — Housing First, done properly (i.e., NOT how we are doing it in Seattle), DOES help people move from substance abuse. And there is LOTS of evidence to back this up. Very sad that misinformation is so widespread, and that Tim (whom I respect greatly) is helping to spread it.
Yes MT and Walter are both correct here. Harm reduction, conceived correctly, still has merit as well. But it’s routinely — and increasingly in Seattle, institutionally and bureaucratically — misconceived here. When harm reduction becomes a euphemism for normalizing addiction and ignoring its destructive impacts on both the individual addict and the community in which he or she exists, it becomes an amplifier of harm.
Seattle progressivism and our version of latter day version of cultural cosmopolitanism has a serious midwit ideological zealotry problem.
Harm reduction has gone too far and it is now enabling. What harms are being reduced by giving out pipes and tin foil? No one talks about the shoplifting that the drug users resort to in order to pay for their drugs. That leads to store closures.